Making The Case For Sabrina Carpenter To Win ‘Artist Of The Year’ At The AMAs

Getty Image/Merle Cooper With six albums in, the pop star has taken the slow and steady route. That's why she deserves this win.

May 23, 2025 - 06:40

Making The Case For Sabrina Carpenter To Win ‘Artist Of The Year’ At The AMAs

Sabrina Carpenter AMAs — Getty Image/Merle Cooper

Sabrina Carpenter, the world’s tiniest (not horniest, thank you very much) pop star is up for six categories at this year’s American Music Awards. With nods for Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Favorite Female Pop Artist, Favorite Pop Album, and Favorite Pop Song it’s safe to say Carpenter, who has been scooping up wins at most award shows in the past year, will likely be bringing home more trophies.

Carpenter’s saccharine, sincere, and risqué pop album went right to the top of Billboard charts when it was released. Plus, that me “Espresso,” a disco, funk-fueled track about being addicting, lived up to its thesis, becoming Sabrina’s first top 10 single on the Billboard Hot 100 before ultimately topping the chart and becoming a permanent item on the pop culture conscious menu.

This year, Sabrina is up against a star-studded list of contemporaries for Artist of the Year: Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Kendrick Lamar, Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, SZA, Taylor Swift, and Zach Bryan. And though each of these artists are worthy competitors when it comes to hits and music industry success, Sabrina’s last year stands out in comparison. Not just because of her ability to spawn hit after hit (each song from Short N’ Sweet charted) but due to the amount of work she put into the album and her career, which basically started back in 2009, when she posted a video of herself covering Taylor Swift’s “Picture To Burn” to YouTube at just 10 years old, and made the decision to become a singer.

Short N’ Sweet is Carpenter’s sixth studio album. Sixth. She released four albums via Disney’s Hollywood Records before sharing her first album on Island in 2022 with Email’s I Can’t Send. The album hinted at, but didn’t fully embody Sabrina’s writing prowess — with tracks like “because i liked a boy,” that dug into her contentious relationship with fame, and relationship drama that seemed to take precedence in the media over her music. Then there was “Nonsense,” whic showed off her word play and cheeky delivery as she sang about being tongue-tied and later, improvised lines live on stage as she mixed innuendo with wit, again making headlines, this time for her boundary-pushing talent. By the time fans heard “Feather,” from the deluxe version of the album, she was fully comfortable putting her personality into her music: hilarious, cutting, and unafraid to distill chaotic relationships into pop bops, her confidence in her own brand of writing over sometimes retro, always incomparable sonics, had been achieved — and she did it while ignoring voices outside of her own. “I’ll put it this way,” she told PAPER last year. “When I was younger, I was told by a lot of grown men that I needed to pick a genre, stay in that genre, be that genre and do one thing.”

In fact, the same nonsensical yet cunning lyrics (i.e. “Say you can’t sleep baby I know/ That’s that me espresso,”) that pushed her into the spotlight were dubbed “lazy” by some critics, and others called her songs “raunchy.” She hit back at those naysayers in The Independent, sharing, “Female artists have been shamed forever. In the Noughties it was Rihanna, in the Nineties it was Britney Spears, in the Eighties it was Madonna – and now it’s me. It is totally regressive.” She continued to wear her coquetteish fashions, drop expletives in love songs, and move so suggestively on stage that she had folks on social media claiming to be “afraid.”

Still, there were those who saw the vision, like Taylor Swift who had her open for dates on her behemoth Eras Tour. There was also music heads like Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor who dubbed “Espresso” his song of the year. But mostly there was Sabrina, who year after year, showed up for her dream. “For a long time, I was constantly guided and misguided,” she told Time. “I’m so grateful for all of those times where I was led astray, because now I’m a lot more equipped going into situations where I have to trust my own instincts.” And those instincts led her to Short N’ Sweet.

It’s hard to imagine another singer being nominated for Best New Artist by the Recording Academy six albums in. For Sabrina, it makes sense. She spent most of her life building a foundation for success — from early dance classes and voice lessons, to Disney acting debuts and industry boundaries she’s pushed through — taking the slow and steady route is the reason Sabrina deserves to win this race.

It’s a method for success, Sabrina was at first taught reluctantly, before experiencing it first hand. “Something that my mom always said to me as a little girl that really annoyed me was that I am the tortoise, and if you guys know the tortoise and the hare thing, that pissed me off a lot,” she said on stage while accepting the Rising Star Award at the 2023 Variety Hitmakers event. “Throughout my life, [I was] being told, ‘Sabrina, you’re the tortoise, just chill,’ like ‘it’s okay, you’re the tortoise, just slow down, it’s going to be okay. In moments of frustration and confusion, it can feel like a letdown, but it turns out it’s actually a very good thing. And I’ve really loved getting to know the mindset of a slow rise.” Here’s to Sabrina’s not-so-overnight success, to pushing towards the mark no matter what, and to (fingers-crossed) even less room on her crowded award shelf.